The present invention relates to a method for organizing and consulting electronic data in the environment of a media library.
The proliferation and the development of information media (Mail, Web, NewsGroup, etc.), of communications networks such as Internet or of companies' document databases have led to a considerable increase in the amounts of data, documents and information in general. The users of these new technologies (computer specialists or otherwise) are confronted with problems of consulting, storing, organizing, working on, annotating, sharing and transmitting this mass of information.
The storage and the management of documents collected from every type of medium, such as a network, very often constitute a real problem. There exist various approaches for optimization of the storage, which make reference to the example of a book.
Mention may be made particularly of the work by Xerox PARC, Bell Labs (smart paper), Interval Research (Paul Allen and Rob Tow), MIT Media Lab, and Modern Age Books, Inc. The products resulting from this work have the common feature of proposing a metaphor of a book and tools allowing navigation within electronic books.
The product “SuperBook Document Browser” is already known, and provides an interactive environment for analysis of data and graphical representations. This product offers a table of contents, an indexing system, annotations and hypertext functions.
The products “WebBook” and “WebForager”, designed by Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, are also known. The WebBook is a three-dimensional interactive book consisting of HTML pages. The Web Forager is an application which inserts the WebBook and other objects into a hierarchical three-dimensional work space. The WebBook takes advantage of the metaphor of a book, and assembles a group of Web pages. The WebBook pre-loads a set of web pages and displays them in the form of a simulated physical book. Links can be coded with the aid of different colors, to distinguish, for example, links between pages and links to references external to the book. When a book is closed, a page marker is automatically placed on the last page consulted. The books can be provided with page markers and be arranged on a shelf. When a book is taken down from its shelf, it is reopened directly at the last page consulted. This product makes it possible to produce “Topic WebBooks”, “Hot List Books” or “Search Reports”.
The WebBook concept takes advantage of the metaphor of a book in the series of prior works such as those produced by Brown or Card and Henderson. Mention may also be made on this subject of the document WO 92 08199 which discloses a method of implementing a metaphor of a book in which all the documents stored are incorporated within a single document. Mention may also be made of the TabWorks system developed by Xerox.
However, the user of these products, taking advantage of the metaphor of a book, is still confronted with the problem of efficient and easy storage of the documents gathered together into the various books of his library. Every time a new book is created, the question is posed of a choice of structure for this book, and a simple organization into chapters and sub-chapters does not make it possible to cope with the complexity of the problems of storage posed, problems which, moreover, differ depending on the origin and on the nature of the documents collected.
There also exists, for document management systems (DMS), a document management integration standard called ODMA (Open Document Management API) allowing applications and document management systems to operate with each other via a single high-level API interface independently of every platform and of every language.
The ODMA standard specifies a set of interfaces which the applications may use to perform operations of a DMS document management system. Moreover, mention may be made of the database management standards of the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) type or JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) type. Mention may be made, moreover, of the downloadable software of the “plug-in” type which also constitutes interfaces for document access which are independent of every platform.
However, none of these products or standards makes it possible to cope with the specific problem of the storage and of the management of documents in the specific context of the metaphor of a book.